3.5 How do I install a piece of Texinfo documentation?

Emacs releases come with pre-built Info files, and the normal install
process places them in the correct location. This is true for most
applications that provide Info files. The following section is only
relevant if you want to install extra Info files by hand.

First, you must turn the Texinfo source files into Info files. You may
do this using the stand-alone makeinfo program, available as part
of the Texinfo package at

For information about the Texinfo format, read the Texinfo manual which
comes with the Texinfo package. This manual also comes installed in
Info format, so you can read it from Emacs; type C-h i m texinfo
<RET>.

Alternatively, you could use the Emacs command M-x
texinfo-format-buffer, after visiting the Texinfo source file of the
manual you want to convert.

Move the files to the info directory in the installed Emacs
distribution. See File-name conventions, if you don't know where that
is.

Run the install-info command, which is part of the Texinfo
distribution, to update the main Info directory menu, like this:

install-info --info-dir=dir-pathdir-path/file

where dir-path is the full path to the directory where you copied
the produced Info file(s), and file is the name of the Info file
you produced and want to install.

If you don't have the install-info command installed, you can
edit the file info/dir in the installed Emacs distribution, and
add a line for the top level node in the Info package that you are
installing. Follow the examples already in this file. The format is:

* Topic: (relative-pathname). Short description of topic.

If you want to install Info files and you don't have the necessary
privileges, you have several options:

Info files don't actually need to be installed before being used.
You can use a prefix argument for the info command and specify
the name of the Info file in the minibuffer. This goes to the node
named ‘Top’ in that file. For example, to view a Info file named
info-file in your home directory, you can type this:

C-u C-h i ~/info-file <RET>

Alternatively, you can feed a file name to the Info-goto-node
command (invoked by pressing <g> in Info mode) by typing the name
of the file in parentheses, like this:

C-h i g (~/info-file) <RET>

You can create your own Info directory. You can tell Emacs where that
Info directory is by adding its pathname to the value of the variable
Info-default-directory-list. For example, to use a private Info
directory which is a subdirectory of your home directory named Info,
you could put this in your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'Info-default-directory-list "~/Info")

You will need a top-level Info file named dir in this directory
which has everything the system dir file has in it, except it
should list only entries for Info files in that directory. You might
not need it if (fortuitously) all files in this directory were
referenced by other dir files. The node lists from all
dir files in Info-default-directory-list are merged by the
Info system.